Licensing Questions

How does LumenVox vend licenses?

LumenVox offers two methods of getting licenses for your Speech Engine:

Through Subscription Licensing - By purchasing a subscription to our hosted authentication License Server, you can obtain licenses over the Internet for a small monthly fee. More can be read about using these licenses here.
Purchasing the licenses outright - You can purchase the licenses and install them locally on our own License Server. The majority of the article below deals with this method of licensing.

How does LumenVox licensing work?

There are two separate components to the LumenVox licensing scheme. One is a License Server, which manages the license information. The other is the licensed product, such as the Speech Engine. There are several steps involved in setting up licenses:

Install the License Server.
Use the License Server to generate a License Server ID file called info.bts that describes the computer's hardware.
Create a deployment on the LumenVox Web site. A deployment is a group of licenses that will be hosted by the same License Server. Note that you can add new licenses to a deployment later, but you cannot remove them.
Upload the info.bts file to the LumenVox Web site. You will need to associate the file with a specific deployment. This is how we know which machine your deployment is on.
After that, licenses can be downloaded from the Web site using that server ID file. These licenses are then tied to that computer and cannot be moved.
Load the license file you downloaded into the License Server. The License Server will now contain all of the license information for that deployment.

When the License Server is started, it loads all of the licenses it has installed. This group of licenses is called the license pool. When you run a product like the Speech Engine, the product checks the License Server to see if any licenses are available.

The License Server checks the license pool, and if the appropriate license is available, the License Server assigns that license to the product. The License Server sends the product a license token that lets the product know the license is available. The License Server removes that license from the pool until the product returns it.

Products and the License Server may run on the same machine, or on separate machines. See our distributed architecture description for more information on this.

How are licenses related to individual computers?

Licenses are tied to specific machines. When you install the License Server, you will generate a file called info.bts that describes the hardware in your system. You then upload this file to our Web site, and we generate a license file that is based on that hardware configuration. The license file will not work on a different machine.

However, if you format the machine, the license will still work on the machine provided the hardware configuration has not changed. We encourage users to keep their licenses on a single machine. Speech Engine clients loaded on different machines can query the central license server for licenses, and you can freely change the machines on which the Speech Engine runs.

We understand that users do sometimes have a need to move licenses onto new hardware. For this reason, we've created an uninstallation process. As long as you still have access to the original license server, you can use the process outlined here.

If the License Server hardware is no longer available, you may to e-mail support@lumenvox.com and briefly explain your situation and our support team will work with you to address the issue.

How many licenses do I need?

The number of licenses you need is determined by the number of simultaneous speech recognitions you will perform. Each Engine license represents one active connection between your speech application and the Speech Engine.

What is the difference between the Lite and Full license types?

Our Speech Engine has two license types, a Lite and a full license. The difference between the two licenses is the number of vocabulary items you can have active at a single time. A vocabulary item is a word or pronunciation in an active grammar.

For instance, a person's name might be two vocabulary items: the first and last names are each one item. If that person also had a nickname, that would be a third item. E.g., "Stephen Smith" and "Steve" would be three items. If you wanted to add an alternative pronunciation for that person's first name (such as ste-faun and stee-ven), that would be a fourth vocabulary item.

The Lite license allows up to 500 vocabulary items at once, while the Full license is unrestricted. Applications using the Full licenses will find practical limitations, however. These are often driven by hardware capabilities and application requirements.

How do I change where my product looks for a License Server?

Please see Configuring Engine Licenses for information on this topic.